Seattle Bike Blog

Bicycle Film Festival returns to Seattle May 6

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 13, 2023
The Bicycle Film Festival will screen May 6 at the Egyptian Theater on Capitol Hill. And among the short films featured is “A short film about Seattle bike messengers, day laborers, and outsourcing gone wild.” Tickets are $30.

From the event listing:
BFF Seattle presents an international short film program. Oscar nominated and award-winning shorts share equal billing with emerging new talent that celebrate the bicycle in all its human power forms. Hosted by The Stranger.

BFF Seattle features stories about:
- A bicycle takeover and one of the United State’s largest, most anticipated street riding events on the bikelife calendar attracting riders from the wheeling community worldwide.
- Olympian and queer cyclist, Lea Davison proves that you don’t have to choose between who you love and the sport you love.
- The story of Reza Alizadeh, a blind bicycle mechanic in Mashhad, Iran.
- The 1900 mile bicycle journey by Erick Cedeno (Bicycle Nomad) retracing the original route of the Buffalo Soldiers.
- The life of a New York City food delivery worker
- A man finds his stolen bicycle and it now belongs to a stranger (2021 Oscar Nomination)
- A family gives up everything to be together in their motorhome, traveling from bike park to bike park across Europe with their mother.
- A short film about Seattle bike messengers, day laborers, and outsourcing gone wild.
- Plus more.
tags: bicycle film festival, events

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Why an e-bike incentive program is one of the best transportation investments Washington can make

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 12, 2023

An electric gravel-ready family bikepacking cargo bike with matching high-performance Crocs and aerodynamic travel potty storage.

The Washington State Senate and House are both mulling over how to incentivize more residents to ride electric bicycles, and the Senate’s version of the state budget would provide a $300 rebate for any state resident who buts an e-bike or $1,200 for low-income e-bike buyers. These rebates would bring the cost of owning an e-bike closer to a pedal bike, ensuring a rapid increase in the number of people riding them in communities across the state.

Washington Bikes has a handy online tool you can use to tell legislators that you support these investments as well as other biking and safe streets measures under consideration.

E-bikes are an incredible technology for communities without dense and walkable urban environments, which describes nearly all of Washington State. Where a pedal bike is still an amazing machine that can do much more than most people give it credit for, e-bikes are one of the world’s emerging technologies that truly does live up to the hype. If anything, the potential within them is underestimated and underrated.

E-bikes make daily trips across fairly long distances practical for a huge percentage of Washington individuals and families. While the most determined and fit among us have shown that long daily rides are possible using pedal bikes—even with kids and grocery runs and all—e-bikes can make these trips faster and easier. For example, the other day I had to take my kid to the doctor for a check-up before school. I didn’t even think about the distance before leaving the house. But when I got back, I realized that my morning ride to the doctor, preschool and home was more than 16 miles, mostly in the rain. All that before my morning coffee.

But here’s the thing: It wasn’t a big deal. It was just another day of doing kid transportation with an e-bike in Seattle. I didn’t even think of it as exercise. There was no huffing and puffing or anything resembling strenuous exercise despite the many hills along the way. It was probably about as physically exerting as a brisk walk.

For comparison, if you started in the city center of Amsterdam and biked 16 miles west, you’d travel through farm land, cross the entirety of the city of Haarlem, and ride through a national park before reaching the North Sea. The distances people often need to cover in Washington State communities just to do basic things can easily balloon like this, and that’s why e-bikes are such a powerful tool for helping more people live their daily lives on bicycles.

(more…)

tags: 2023 legislature, e-bikes, washington bikes

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Rainier Valley Greenways: How to make ‘Bicycle Weekends’ on Lake Washington Blvd better

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 11, 2023

Since 1968, Seattle Parks has been hosting car-free days on Lake Washington Boulevard during the spring and summer. It’s one of the longest-running open streets events in the world, and the department partnered with SDOT in recent years to expand it to last full weekends.

As planning gets underway for the 2023 season, Rainier Valley Greenways and Safe Streets has offered a handful of great suggestions for improving the events based on lessons learned in previous years. At the top of the list: Improve the consistency and predictability of the scheduling. This is a big one, and it makes the events better both for participants and for people driving who would be less likely to be surprised by a detour.

They also want to see the Parks Departments put more work into programming the space. Simply having the space open is great, but it is also a great opportunity to do more and create some memorable experiences for park goers in lakefront spaces that are usually difficult to access due to car traffic.

We also need to be focused on developing a permanent plan for walking and biking space on the boulevard, and SDOT and the Parks Department should be looking to use Bicycle Weekends as a way to engage the public about the options for doing so. Seattle should aim to have a plan in place and ready to build by the end of this year’s Bicycle Weekends season.

You can read the full letter to the project team, Mayor Bruce Harrell, and the City Council’s Parks Committee. Below is their list of suggestions: (more…)

tags: bicycle sunday, bicycle weekends, lake washington blvd, parks and recreation, rainier valley greenways, sdot

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City awards E Marginal Way contract, work to start in fall

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 10, 2023

A complete rebuild of E Marginal Way has been in the works for a long time, and work is set to finally get under way this autumn.

The street is both a major bike route and the trucking access point for several Port terminals, and the project has been an example of bike safety and heavy freight interests working together. Once complete, the roadway will be heavily reinforced to handle major truck traffic and will have completely separated and protected bike lanes.

Initial funding for this project was first announced a decade ago, just two weeks after someone driving a truck struck and killed Lance David at E Marginal Way and S Hanford Street while he was biking to work. RIP.

The project is so large and expensive that it required a federal grant to get it off the ground. It has also ballooned in scope and now includes installing a major water main. For these reasons, work has been repeatedly pushed back.

(more…)

tags: marginal way, sdot

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Why my trip to Amsterdam made me love Seattle even more

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 6, 2023

I expected to feel a little sad upon arriving back in the United States after a weeklong family vacation in Amsterdam. But that’s not what happened.

I love Seattle, and I love biking here. Perhaps it’s because I’m older now or have a kid or because I wrote a whole book about biking in this town, but I’m seeing cities in a totally different context now than I did the last time I was biking around Europe back in 2016. Rather than stewing in envy about the vastly superior walking, biking and transit experience in the storied Dutch city, I’m filled with optimism and hope for our young and odd city.

Writing my book forced me to take a big step back from the day-to-day politics of Seattle and think about the multi-generational context of this place. Zoom out far enough and it’s hard to see anything other than white supremacy. This land was claimed under the Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, which was an explicitly white supremacist law guided by the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Only a “white settler or occupant of the public lands” could make claims, and the United States military defended those claims with violence. Many of the decisions Seattle’s government made and continues to make to this day have been based around increasing and protecting the value of these land claims.

Looking at Amsterdam through a similar lens (though one that needs to zoom out much further back in time), and you see a city built using the spoils of colonialism. Those colonial holdings were enforced by military might and justified through racism. Much of the wealth from colonialism was invested into the buildings and canals and streets and trains and museums that make up that amazing place.

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam is a fascinating place these days. Formerly the Colonial Museum, the Tropenmuseum is now seemingly in the midst of wrestling with the brutal reality of colonialism. They turned the core exhibition of its artifacts upside down by making the exhibit about the theft of the artifacts. It’s not simply acknowledged in the fine print, it’s the focus of the exhibit. “Our Colonial Inheritance” is about the ways Dutch colonialism has shaped those places, and how colonized places shaped Dutch culture. It’s not a perfect exhibit, but it was much more frank and honest than any other colonial artifact exhibits in other grand European museums I’ve visited.

Understanding the horrors and injustices that built these places is ultimately liberating because it scrapes away the veneer of legitimacy, removes the misplaced need to have reverence for past perpetrators of theft and violence, and ultimately demystifies our cities. We are the people of this city now, and all of us have inherited this place and its history. It is up to us to make our own decisions about what happens here next. No white settler decision from our city’s past is sacred. It is never too late to seek justice.

Truly loving a city, whether it’s Amsterdam or Seattle, requires learning and fully embracing the truth about its past. I love Seattle not because of what it was in the past, but because it is always changing. It is a place balanced on top of ridges carved by glaciers with active volcanoes building pressure on one side and a massive fault building pressure underwater on the other. This place is alive and powerful. People elsewhere look at Seattle as though it is some kind of city of the future, and that puts our city in a very interesting position. It’s our city’s responsibility to showcase the future we want to see everywhere. And really, what do we have to lose by trying?

There are so many smart and inspiring people in Seattle. I know it is difficult to watch local news closely and witness the city fail day after day to live up to its potential. But to all of you out there trying every day to make things better, I believe in you.

I believe that Seattle can house every resident in a healthy, safe and dignified home. I believe Seattle will be the first major U.S. city to eliminate traffic deaths and injuries. I believe Seattle can thrive using only renewable energy. I believe Seattle can restore the rightful power and wealth owed to Indigenous and historically exploited communities, and that doing so would make our city even stronger.

I personally don’t hold the answers on how exactly to do all of this, but I believe the communities in our city can and will figure it out together. And then we’ll show the world.

tags: amsterdam, Amsterdam vacation 2023, seattle

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Disability Rights Washington, Front and Centered call on state to fund $10M sidewalk assessment

By

Tom Fucoloro

| Posted

April 5, 2023

Here’s something weird: We don’t really know where sidewalks do or do not exist in Washington State. We have some ideas, but no comprehensive dataset. Our bad data is even worse if you need to know which sidewalks and curb cuts are accessible.

It is also difficult to know how much money the public needs to invest in filling sidewalk gaps or where those investments are most needed.

Disability Rights Washington and Front and Centered are hosting a rally in Olympia today calling on the legislature to fully fund the sidewalk assessment. Here’s the text of their press release:

Mapping how to get somewhere is something drivers take for granted. Punch in your destination and Google Maps, and you’re good to go. That is just not available to people who are walking and rolling to destinations, including the 25-30 percent of people in our state who are nondrivers.

Unlike roads and highways, there simply is no comprehensive data on sidewalks and safe routes to walk or roll. We need our state to make investments in this year’s transportation budget to map where pedestrian infrastructure exists and understand whether it’s accessible.

This is not simply a planning exercise. As a result of collecting this invaluable data, people all over Washington will be able to use this data to route safer paths to walk or roll. And eventually, this data will also be crucial to closing the enormous backlog of missing and broken sidewalks all over the state.

As The Seattle Times detailed last year, (WA Faces an Epidemic of Inaccessible Sidewalks, Oct 3, 2022) Washington State faces a crisis of broken and missing sidewalks; according to their investigation, zero Washington cities can claim to meet at least 50% ADA accessibility. At the same time, we are in the midst of a 20-year record in serious injuries and deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists on our roads, an epidemic that disproportionately affects communities of color.

For about what it costs to pave three miles of rural road with no shoulders, we can make a transformative investment that will have an immediate positive impact on the lives of people all over the state.

tags: 2023 legislature, disability rights washington, front and centered, sidewalks

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